The idea is certainly a good one. Power Manager Full combines a visual panel which lets you see your battery level, as well as what power hogging features you have enabled – specifically wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS and cell location.
Control over these aspects is enabled using preset selections (touchscreen buttons), which break down into situations such as A/C powered, Low battery. Browsing mode, and Battery powered. These can be automatically triggered as your battery level falls to certain percentages or when you get a USB or full A/C connection.
Alternatively you can always just press the buttons at the top of the panel to switch features off and on as you desire. And if you’re really ambitious, you can delve into the Menu and choose the Add profile option and create your own automatic presets. (As you can see, I’ve unimaginatively created one called “everything: all on”. Guess what that does?)
More detail is provided via the dedicated Battery info page, while you can dump out those stats to a CSV file should that sort of thing be useful.
Further digging around in Help system informs you that you can also edit presets, by selecting them and then hitting the Menu button, which is a rather obscure mechanism. Surely the Edit option could be listed in the main Menu selection? Nevertheless, this is probably okay as Power Manager is an app for people who like to tinker. Still it did take us a while to discover we could edit and delete profiles.
The other slightly annoying aspect is you can’t choose to switch between use of 2G and 3G networks in the presets; that has to be done manually. The app’s also buggy when switching between portrait and landscape modes but as you only need to use the keyboard to enter the name of a new preset, it’s not a biggie.
So the bottomline is Power Manager provides a visual interface to the G1′s system settings, which in our opinion is a very useful thing to have, especially for $0.99.
N.B. After using Power Manager for a further week; I’d like to add that I now consider it an essential Android application in terms of managing how you control your phone’s battery life. It just works in the background but definitely saves you hours of otherwise wasted juice.
//Ideally priced, Power Manager Full is a great app for people who want to get the most of out their phone in terms of its battery capacity – and that should mean everyone
App: Power Manager Full (Android)
download link : hotfile